BrontoSoreAss wrote:As far as I'm concerned cds are making less and less sense - they are a bulky, over priced and are becoming increasingly more obsolete. I find it hard to find value in something I can replicate in 10 minutes with utorrent, nero, and a spool of shiny frisbees from the office supply store.
I find this notion that CDs are somehow overpriced laughable. When CDs showed up in stores from 83-85, they were priced at $17.99 or $18.99, at a time when cassettes (remember those?) and LPs cost $8.99. When I managed a record store in 1992-94, CD list prices had come down to $14.99 and $15.99; cassettes and LPs were still $8.99 or so. By this time, most listeners had switched over to CDs, and people actually bought CDs, sometimes stacks of em in a single visit to a record store. People actually bought used CDs for as much as $8.99-9.99, and we were thrilled. We loved CDs because every time we played them they sounded just as good, which was a huge advance over LPs and cassettes.
Now CDs might come out with a high list price, but they are routinely discounted to $9.99-$11.99 in a desperate attempt to sell them to the few buyers left. This is in 2010 dollars vs. $17.99 in 1985 dollars vs. $14.99 in 1994 dollars. Obviously there has been price inflation over the last 16-25 years, so I think it's safe to say that the price of CDs has decreased considerably over time.
When Napster came around in 99 or so, tech savvy people of all ages started grabbing all the free music they could download, and an attitude of 'paying for music is for suckers' evolved. This has obviously continued with the advent of decentralized file sharing, torrents, music blog sites, etc. to the point where few people, not just youngsters, feel like music has any monetary value. Now with Youtube and similar sites, I think we're at the point where people feel less inclined to even download music, because it's always just a click away. Sure, maybe CDs seem overpriced even now, but that's because they're being compared to something that costs zero to the end listener.